A Transportation and Land Use Blog

Monthly Archives: October 2014

This afternoon I discovered an article titled “The 10 highest sales-generating malls in the U.S.” on Fortune. I instantly became curious what these malls’ relationship was with walkability. Almost as instantly I realized that Walk Score could allow me to quickly quantify the malls’ relative walkabilities.

Summary of findings: with the exception of the Woodbury Common Premium Outlets, the malls all had a walk score exceeding 50! Here is a table of the 10 malls sorted by walk score:

Obviously Walk Score is not a perfect system for evaluating walkability. I feel that it is too heavily weighted towards nearby amenities and doesn’t pay enough attention to the quality of the walk. However, it does provide quick results and makes it simple and easy to compare locations.

Like this:

The Utah Transit Authority will celebrate the 15th anniversary of the opening of its first light rail line in December 2014, which started with a 15-mile segment and quickly expanded to the beautiful 135-mile system that we have today. Since no one has taken the time to actually put together a document to chronicle the system’s expansion, I decided to take on the task and am now releasing the draft that I put together in August.

I’m still wanting to make some tweaks on the map and would appreciate feedback. Even though my creation isn’t the typical transit map since it’s been created to scale, I’m also hoping to get some feedback from Cameron Booth of Transit Maps. I chose a scale map rather than a schematic diagram, since I wanted to give viewers an idea of the actual distances being connected by the rail system. For those who are interested, I created it using ArcGIS with data from Utah’s AGRC combined with my own knowledge and a few details clarified using Wikipedia.